After three weeks touring around the United States, Fluke visited Canada last
night for the last date of their tour. We joined them on their 70ft luxury land
cruiser as it passed through Seattle to bring you this special report.

As
with most visits to the land of red maple leaves a beauracratic foul-up at the
border forced them to pay out over $1,000 to get in, but in they got and were
greeted with a 1,500 person capacity club with one of the better sound systems
of the whole tour. After much tweaking by sound engineer Jon Pennington the
PA was soon exclaimed by the resident techs to sound better and much louder
than it had ever sounded before at which point the band ran through a few songs
before retiring to the hotel to prepare for the show.

By 12:00AM the MARS was packed with lovers of electronic music that had made
their way through the pouring rain to see what is rapidly becoming one of the
pre-emminent electronic music bands of the nineteen nineties.

After ten years of relative obscurity the two Mike's (Mike T on keyboards
and Mike B on everything else) and singer John Fugler are finally beginning
to recieve the usual recognition thing, but with the recent addition of Rachael,
a pure voiced intrinsically intimidating rebel rouser from bonnie Scotland,
the band is complete. Lighting plays a most important part in most live shows,
especially for a high energy show such as this, and Andy Watton who has been
on the lights for most of the bands career did a superb job. While watching
a replay of the show on a Sony digital video camera on the way back to Seattle
I noticed the extent to which timing becomes a crucial part of the lighting
process, and with a band like Fluke who are capable of throwing anything in
at any time during the show you really have to be on your toes.

From the opening of Atom Bomb with its grinding analog bass with deep space
sound effects and super cool vocals through to the encore performance of Electric
Guitar the band kept the audience tightly wrapped around its collective fingers,
all the while being wooed by Rachael as John Fugler, pacing around like a mad
man, leered at the crowd. A tag team who didn't for one second let the audience
out of its grasp.

This was also technically one of the best shows I've seen, with songs that
worked incredibly well under performance conditions. Obviously an incredible
amount of work went into what took place tonight, with remarkable attention
payed to the kind of tiny details that make all the difference. An attention
to detail that is absolutely crucial if you're to captivate an audience that
thinks it's seen and heard it all before.

Bottom line is this, if electronic music is to become a genre that's here
to stay it's going to take bands like Fluke to make sure that complacency never
sets in, to ensure that the live performance remains as important as the countless
hours it takes to get the music to disk.